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One of my first exposures to Islam was during seminary on a study tour of the Middle East. We were in Damascus, Syria visiting the Umayyad Mosque or Grand Mosque. It is one of the oldest and largest mosques in the world and one of the three places that the head of John the Baptist is supposed to be buried. Inside the mosque there is a huge place for prayer in which all are welcome but you must take off your shoes and if you’re a woman, cover your head. There are no pews for sitting just very beautiful oriental rugs on the floor for you to sit or kneel or bow down. But no reclining; you don’t want to appear as if you are asleep. There is a man with a cane called a tapper who comes around and loudly taps the ground beside those who look like they are sleeping. He will also tap at you, if you are talking or whispering too loudly.
The Prayer Hall of the Umayyad Mosque was obviously a place for prayer. Open to all who wish a quiet, sacred place to pray. As tourists, we seemed a bit out of place but it is the way of Islamic culture to show hospitality, to let others see how they pray and worship, to see that a mosque is a place of Salaam, peace where all people can come to pray. One thing we did not see there were people selling souvenirs. No one was selling commemorative slippers or flip-flops for you to wear when you took your shoes off. Those were freely available. There was no scarf vender for women who had no head covering. Those also were freely available. There were no people, loaded down with bags, just passing through because it was shorter to go through the mosque rather than around the mosque. This was a place of prayer.
Well, let’s turn to the Jerusalem Temple back in Jesus’ day. Our reading this morning of Jesus cleansing the Temple is set in the part of the Jerusalem Temple complex that would have been similar to the Prayer Hall at the Umayyad Mosque. This was the Courtyard of the Gentiles, the only part of the Temple complex accessible to non-Jews. There, in the Courtyard of Gentiles, where non-Jewish people were supposed to find a place to seek the God of Israel and pray, Jesus did not find people praying. Rather, he found that the priests had turned the religious practice of sacrifice into a lucrative business.
You see, only unblemished livestock could be offered to God and the only way one could be absolutely sure your livestock offering was unblemished was to buy your lamb, goat, bull or whatever from the priests at the temple. Therefore, the Courtyard of the Gentiles was looking a bit like a crowded livestock market. Also, one did not venture to Jerusalem and not go to the Temple and make at least a Thank Offering which could have been a handful of grain or a dove. So, there were rows upon rows of doves in cages behind a row of tables where the vendors sat to keep people from just going and taking one. There were also the moneychangers. Most people had only Roman currency which had an image of Caesar on it. In the opinion of the priests that was idolatry and so they only allowed Jewish currency in the temple. And so, you had to exchange currency at a cost to buy your sacrifice. The priests had turned the Courtyard of the Gentiles into a big, business crowded livestock market. To add insult to injury, there were lots of people just passing through the Courtyard loaded down with stuff because going through the courtyard with its many gates was a much quicker way to go from point A to point B in Jerusalem. There wasn’t much room for someone just to sit and pray.
So, here it was the day after Jesus’ Triumphal donkey ride into Jerusalem amidst a crowd of people proclaiming him to be the Messiah, the King of Israel. Surprisingly, Jesus didn’t go to the King’s Palace to dethrone the king and take over. Rather, he burst into the Temple, into the Courtyard of the Gentiles, and started disrupting the money making and he began to teach, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations? But you have turned it into a den of thieves.”
Just to let you know, this is one of those rare moments in Mark’s Gospel where Jesus lets slip who he is. His house isn’t the King’s Palace. His house is the Temple where God is supposed to be. Therefore, he’s claiming to be God and his house is not supposed to be this big business thing that it had become. His house was supposed to be a house of prayer for all peoples and the place where our sin-broken relationship with God gets cleaned up.
If you will allow me to play Bible Geek for a moment, Jesus was quoting from the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah. The house of prayer part comes from In Isaiah 56 where God says the day will come when he will welcome to his house the likes of eunuchs, foreigners, and outcasts – people elsewhere excluded from God’s presence – and give them a place in God’s presence. Then, immediately after God says that, he goes on to invite the wild animals into the fold because the shepherds of the people have no understanding and have turned away to their own gain. If the priest know their Isaiah, they know Jesus is jabbing at them.
The den of thieves quote comes from Jeremiah 7 where God is addressing the idolatry of the people and the resultant immoral and unethical behaviour. He points out that they are idolatrous, worshipping other gods, but still they come to worship at the temple and act as if they are saints all the while looking at his priesthood who are just doing their work in the same way that people today will say ministers and churches are corrupt and only after your money when we truly are just trying to do God’s work. Well, here in this quote Jesus puts the shoes on the other feet: the people, instead of being corrupted by idolatry, are sincerely coming to the Temple to do what God has asked them do but it’s the priests, the shepherds, who have turned to seeking their own gain and really only want their money. The people wanted the Messiah to come and bring the Kingdom of God but the Temple establishment was doing nothing to prepare them for it. They are instead robbing the people.
There’s some more interesting Bible Geek stuff here, if you will allow me. All four of the Gospels recount the Temple cleansing very similarly, but Mark is the only one to include the “of the nations” from the quote from Isaiah. Mark seems to want to note that the big business practices of the Temple establishment had made it so that the Courtyard of the Gentiles, where people from other nations could come seek the God of Israel, was so crowded with the vendors and livestock that people couldn’t come there to pray. I think of how churches today in their efforts to attract and market the faith to outsiders have made their foyers into mini-malls with coffee shops and trinket stores and have turned their sanctuaries into concert venues so that there’s no space that seems sacred or welcoming to those just needing to pray.
Also, Mark is the only one of the Gospeler’s to note that Jesus would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. Now you really have to be a Bible Geek to catch this. This sentence is loaded with the language and concept of forgiveness. In both the Hebrew and Greek languages the words for “forgiveness” and “to forgive” are rooted in the idea of picking up and carrying the burdens or sins of another. Forgiveness not this “Be remorseful and say you’re sorry, and then I’ll forgive you” transaction thing we understand forgiveness to be. In the Day of Atonement Sacrifices and the Sin Offerings the sin of the people is in essence transferred to the sacrificial animal who then bears it away to death thus cleansing, freeing, healing the person of it so they can walk away from it and leave it behind. Jesus became the sacrificial animal when at his baptism he took the sin of the people upon himself and he bore sin away unto death on the cross. That’s the Good Friday sermon so I won’t go into that here.
There’s also the word “allow”; Jesus would not allow anyone to carry anything through the Temple. The Greek word for forgive is the one we translate here as “allow”. This doesn’t mean that to forgive is to allow someone to keep doing bad, terrible, hurtful stuff. It is to allow it in the sense of bearing with that person in their sin rather than casting them out. Once again, we come back to forgiveness being about bearing the sins of another until they are freed and healed of it. Remember the four men who carried a paralytic on his mat to Jesus to be healed. Jesus looked at what the four men were doing and saw their faith and then said to the man, “Son, your sins are forgiven.” Forgiveness is bearing people in there brokenness to Jesus for healing. Forgiveness is a complicated subject for another sermon.
Mark’s noting here that Jesus would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple is Mark’s way of pointing out that the temple being the place where sin was dealt with, where sins were born or carried away in sacrifice was no longer the way it works. Jesus, the Messiah, had arrived, God the Son, God incarnate and Jesus will be the once and for all sacrifice who bears away the sin of the world.
And while I’m unloading the truckload of Bible Geek stuff here, it is interesting to note that when the priests and scribes heard that Jesus was putting a stop to their livestock trading and money changing in the Courtyard of the Gentiles, they began to seek a way to kill him. “Seek” is a word that comes up often in the Psalms and the Book of Isaiah pertaining to our relationship with God. Isaiah 55:6-7 says: “Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts, let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.” The Chief Priests and Scribes, the spiritual leadership of Israel, instead of seeking their LORD while he was near and could be found – standing right there in their midst – they began to seek a way to kill him. Instead of having a healthy reverence of him – The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom – they are flat out afraid of Jesus because he will take away their empire of spiritual abuse from them and give the people what they truly hunger and thirst for, Himself.
Anyway, I need to quit playing Bible Geek now and try to say something relevant. Back to my visit to the Umayyad mosque. It struck me as being a house of prayer open at all times to all people. I visited there back in the mid-1990’s when I was yet a couple of years away from going into the pastorate. At that time, the mega-church movement was really starting to take hold in North America while the main street church and the rural church were really starting to decline. A huge and influential business practice was taking hold in the church, marketing they called it. How to market your church to make it an attractive product that people will come and take part in. Almost overnight churches began to change from houses of prayer into “worship venues” with campuses and malls where you can buy sacred reading stuff and trinkets. Sanctuaries became more like concert venues, sermons became like the motivational talks you would hear at a business convention. The church became like entertainment. With a charismatic leader and a good board any church could grow and become a mega-church. In my opinion, church became religious big business and that ain’t what the church is.
Since then, in my nearly 25 years now of ministry, I have been perplexed by the constant question of how do we turn this dying church around. Today, even the mega-churches, which grew so fast mostly because people were leaving the “dud church” for the “super flash in the pan” church, even they are in decline. Our land is no longer a Christian land. We are working on generation three of people not knowing what “church” is about, not realizing their hunger for God. On top of that, most of what they have heard about the church has been negative. In this pandemic, there has been no reporting on the churches and the Christians who have compassionately abided by the protocols and found new ways to support one another and help the elderly. But rather, the media has certainly loved pointing out those churches who called it faith in God to flaunt the pandemic protocols and, in turn, became super-spreaders of COVID-19.
At present, there is a fear among churches as to whether this pandemic will be the final straw that will close the doors. It will likely be another year before we can open our doors and congregate the way we used to and only then will we know what we’ve got to work with. Meanwhile, this pandemic has certainly made us think about what the role of the church is in our lives and communities. Online is not the same. We have greatly missed the fellowship our congregations provide and we have also learned new ways to look after and care for each other and our neighbours. The question now isn’t so much how do we turn around. It is what will we be when we are finally able to gear it up again. At the moment, “What are we here for, as a church, as a body of Christ?” is a good question to be pondering because when we get back it’s not going to be the same.
There are some parameters here in our passage today that we should consider. The house of prayer matter is important. We need to make sure that we communicate clearly that our church buildings are houses of prayer, sacred spaces, that are open to all. We also need to make sure that we the followers of Jesus don’t come across as those who judge the sins of the world, but rather as those who bear with people in their brokenness helping them to find cleansing, freedom, and healing. This year of mostly isolation has been tough on people couped up together. There have been things said and done that people will need cleansing from, freedom from, healing from. We need to make it clear that our gatherings are places and times when people can seek the LORD and…find him…and be found…because he is near, in our midst and he can take their burden from them and carry it away. We don’t have to turn church into a time to entertain in the hopes that people will stick around. We just have to be sincere about the fact the Jesus is among us to be sought and found and he will carry our burdens away and restore us with his Spirit. Amen.
